> We are not encountering similar sets of problems nor are able to use similar solutions or even refer to familiar tooling all of the time.
Frankly, yes we are. There’s only so many ways to solve a problem and there’s only so many problems to solve in a particular field.
A senior engineer should have had enough experience to at least have a high level understanding of what is going on, and to correlate that experience with approximate work. If that’s not possible, the work is just not scoped down enough.
A team of engineers, given their combined experience and business knowledge should pretty easily come up with a story point estimate based on existing completed work. And that’s the entire point of the refinement and estimation process: getting enough information about a piece of work, then working together to come to a decision on an estimate.
Will that be right all the time? No. But that doesn’t mean the value is useless, it provides plenty of information on if a piece of work is small, medium or large, as well as if it’s expected to take a few hours, days or weeks. And who better to come up with that number than the people actually working on the issues?
>There’s only so many ways to solve a problem and there’s only so many problems to solve in a particular field.
That is true today but not tomorrow. The field often changes. New ideas generate new ways to think of problems which require new experimental designs to solve. New experimental designs become possible with new technologies offering more resolution or fidelity. Entirely divergent technologies sometimes emerge which offer new metadata to compare with in the analysis, or change the context for other forms of analysis. What was cost prohibitive becomes cheap. All of this means you cannot merely write a few pipelines and expect them to be cutting edge forever. You cannot automate the very creative act of hypothesis generation. You cannot reliably develop an automated solution without first developing some sort of a test over a subset of the data or a simulated dataset, to ensure your solution to a given problem even has the power to resolve what you are expecting it to resolve.
Frankly, yes we are. There’s only so many ways to solve a problem and there’s only so many problems to solve in a particular field.
A senior engineer should have had enough experience to at least have a high level understanding of what is going on, and to correlate that experience with approximate work. If that’s not possible, the work is just not scoped down enough.
A team of engineers, given their combined experience and business knowledge should pretty easily come up with a story point estimate based on existing completed work. And that’s the entire point of the refinement and estimation process: getting enough information about a piece of work, then working together to come to a decision on an estimate.
Will that be right all the time? No. But that doesn’t mean the value is useless, it provides plenty of information on if a piece of work is small, medium or large, as well as if it’s expected to take a few hours, days or weeks. And who better to come up with that number than the people actually working on the issues?